|
The Call Is Your Most Valuable Asset By Ingrid Spencer
Let's say you're a call center manager at one of the leading long-distance phone companies in the U.S. You find out that in a certain area of the country, customers have difficulties paying their bills. What can your call center do to help your customers, as well as your company? This was the situation that Oscar Alban, principal global market consultant with Witness Systems (Roswell, GA), encountered when he ran a 1,200-person call center at MCI prior to joining Witness. He recalls that MCI's billing department identified a part of the U.S. where billing problems were most common. By listening to recordings of calls, the department recognized that in this area of the U.S., children of customers were calling on behalf of parents who didn't speak English. "Once the data was reported and analyzed, MCI could address the billing concern, but more importantly, could identify and address a critical and emotional need of customers in this region," explains Alban. "Bilingual billing could be put in place and sales for MCI went up." Call monitoring is, and continues to be, a useful way for agents to learn how they come across when they speak with customers. But, in a broader sense, companies, too, gain insights from recordings of customers' calls. Even if customers aren't able to be explicit about their needs, as was the case in Alban's example, by listening to calls with customers, companies can improve their service to customers. "Companies are not just interested in catching samples of agents' interaction with customers," says Ted Lubowsky, vice president of sales and marketing with Envision (Seattle, WA). "They now want to find the reasons that customers are calling." Recording All Calls As the cost of recording and storing calls becomes less costly, it makes more sense, from a financial and logistical viewpoint, for call centers to retain recordings of all calls. With that said, an even greater benefit of recording all calls is that they identify ways call centers can generate more revenue for their companies, rather than focusing only on what agents do. "There used to be a perception that there is this fumbling, bumbling agent out there who is providing inefficient service to customers, and that's who we wanted to find with call monitoring," says Envision's Lubowsky. "Now there is a sophistication that companies are experiencing. They now know that agents are often not the problem, but something deeper, a root cause. Monitoring every call in multiple ways and organizing the data can reveal a lot more." Lubowsky cites an example. "An airline ticket sales call center discovered, through call monitoring, that people were using the call center to answer questions and get information, rather than to actually purchase tickets," he says. "Once their question was answered, they would hang up and go on-line to buy tickets. Now, while in certain circumstances that is preferred, in this circumstance the airline felt that if they could just close the deal — have the customer purchase the tickets while the agent had them on the phone, they could up their sales. Of course, that proved to be correct." Call monitoring also enables other areas of a company to learn from conversations with customers. "One set of facts could be more important to the sales and marketing department, while another set should get to the HR department," says Jake White, marketing director with HigherGround (Canoga Park, CA). "It's all about analyzing the data. The data itself can often lead the way for a company to be more effective in a certain area." For some types of call centers, given the types of calls they answer, recording all conversations isn't just a good idea; it's a requirement. Tony Procops, general manager and senior vice president of ASC Telecom (White Plains, NY), says that ASC Telecom's recording systems are being used in regional and state call centers set up by local or regional public safety departments to monitor 911 calls. Other scenarios when it's necessary to record and play back all calls are those involving financial transactions like stock trades, as well as inquiries to health insurance providers. Consider, for instance, the importance of a recording of a call to a health insurance carrier. The outcome of that call is crucial both to the patient and to the insurer, especially if the call is from someone who is recovering from surgery, and who has just received a bill from a hospital charging tens of thousands of dollars. "It's essential that every part of these calls is recorded," says Procops. "Life and death situations are at stake." Call Monitoring Technology These days, call monitoring systems have to interoperate not only with phone switches, but also with systems that transmit calls along Internet protocol (IP) networks. As more companies rely on these types of networks to unite call centers located among multiple sites, call monitoring systems that accommodate voice-over-IP networks help pave the "way for a virtual call-center infrastructure," says Kristyn Emenecker, product manager of contact center solutions for Mercom Systems (Lyndhurst, NJ). The emergence of speech analytics tools, which mine recordings for anger and stress, is another key trend in call monitoring. "Technologies that power voice-analytic applications are viewed by many to be experimental and in the early stages of adoption," says Richard Parton, CEO of V Worldwide (Washington, DC), which distributes systems from Nemesysco, an Israeli company, that uses a technique known as layered voice analysis (LVA) to categorize calls. "However, those corporations pioneering the deployment of LVA are experiencing significant financial benefits, reduced risk, and in many cases competitive advantage." Parton cites the insurance industry as one that is benefiting from speech analytics. "In the insurance industry, initial trials of LVA-based voice analytic software have effectively reduced the payout of fraudulent claims by more than 30% when used in a call center environment," he says. "Our five-month experience with LVA has shown us that the technology is sound and effective in detecting and analyzing the truthfulness or untruthfulness of a speaker and the risk that a claim involves fraud," said Chris Kvochak, general manager of Safeway Insurance. Learn From Customers Technological developments like speech analytics notwithstanding, call centers recognize that the difference between surveillance and evaluation. LVA for example, helps call centers pinpoint potential for customers to behave in a way that's harmful to a company. But, in the end, the primary purpose of call monitoring is to enable the company to provide more value to, and derive more value from, its customers. "As the lines between the [call] center and the enterprise continue to break down, call monitoring is increasingly being deployed to help the rest of the business better understand what customers want and how the business needs to change to deliver it to them," says Mariann McDonagh, vice president of global marketing with Verint Systems (Melville, NY). As the example with MCI at the beginning of this article illustrates, the value of listening to calls is what you learn from customers. As Witness' Alban says, "You have a direct link to the people who are using your product. What could be better than that?" Where Training Comes In Chances are you've come across more suites that combine call monitoring systems with other components, like workforce management and computer-based training systems. But even vendors that offer these types of suites caution that although the products cut across multiple aspects of running call centers – like quality assurance, scheduling and training – the effectiveness of these tools depends on the people who use them. "No technology is a silver bullet," says Witness' Alban. "If you don't have good processes and properly trained people, then technology won't help you." That's especially true with training, says Terry Ryan, president and CEO of HigherGround, which offers optional training modules from Auckland, New Zealand-based TalkTactics to complement its Fusion Series 7 call monitoring system. "Application-based training still can't measure up to one-on-one training," says Ryan. "In our experience, e-learning tools are best used for company processes, such as how to instruct an agent to answer a call the way the company wants them to. Teaching a new technique works with e-learning, but when you're dealing with the intricacies of human interaction, there's nothing like classroom training." Indeed, when companies align quality assurance and training at an operational level, they can gain efficiencies of employing suites that combine call monitoring and computer-based instruction. "Call centers' greatest assets for training are actual calls," says Alban. "They can replay a call and reveal what works and what doesn't." This observation applies not only when agents' supervisors or quality assurance staffs evaluate recordings of agents' conversations with customers, but also when they listen to live calls. "If the agent can request information or help during a call, then the monitoring system is perceived as helpful to the agent, rather than the traditional view of call monitoring as a big-brother situation," says ASC Telecom's Procops. "Listening and monitoring a random sample of calls can be helpful, but a supervisor can't listen to every call. But, if I can record every call, and help the agents who need help in a live situation, then I'm providing them with the best type of coaching I can give them." When Evaluation and Training Combine: Here's an idea that enabled customers to reap the advantages of a call center's ability to align how it evaluates and trains agents. A number of call monitoring systems, including the Envision Performance Suite from Seattle-based Envision, come with software call centers can use to develop training material for agents. At Blue Cross of Idaho, one of Envision's clients, some of the material that the insurer employed to train agents also turned out to be valuable to customers. "Blue Cross of Idaho found that their customers were using their Web site to ask certain questions," says Dave Pennington, director of product management with Envision. "Blue Cross had used our authoring tools to help train agents to understand the answers. They called and asked, 'Hey Dave, are there any copyright issues to us using your authoring tools to actually train customers as well as agents?' I told them the tools were theirs to use as they needed, so now they are actually using our authoring tools to help customers train themselves in certain areas." The impact of evaluating and training agents isn't limited to employees of your call center. In the process of enabling agents to become more proficient at answering customers' questions, Blue Cross of Idaho itself became more proficient at conveying these answers directly to customers. "It's a turnaround from only training agents," says Pennington. "Why not train customers as well?" Ingrid Spencer is a freelance writer and former managing editor of Computer Telephony Magazine. You Talkin' To Me? Here's how to reach companies mentioned in this article that provide call monitoring systems.
ASC Telecom
Cacti
Co-nexus Communications Systems
Data Collection Resources
Davacord
etalk
Envision
HigherGround
Mercom Systems
Nice Systems
V Worldwide
Verint Systems
Voice Print International
Witness Systems |